Erotic Vagrancy, Roger Lewis
Erotic Vagrancy, Roger Lewis
List: $31.99 | Sale: $22.40
Club: $15.99

Erotic Vagrancy
Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Author: Roger Lewis

Narrator: Justin Avoth

Unabridged: 22 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: riverrun

Published: 10/26/2023


Synopsis

The comic genius of English writing takes on Hollywood, delusion, celebrity and last century's ultimate glamour couple: Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were a Sixties supercharged couple in an era of supercharged couples. As a pairing they were fantasy figures, impossibly desirable. Liz supple and soft, in perfumes and furs - yet with something demonic and lethal about her. Dick, in turn, with his ravaged, handsome face, looked as though lit by silver moonlight - poised to turn into a wolf.

Roger Lewis uses this glamorous and damaged pair as the starting point to tell the story of an age of excess: the freaks and groupies, the private jets and jewels and the yachts sailing in an azure sea; the magnificent bad taste and greed. It is about the clash of worlds: the filth and decay of South Wales and the grandeur and elegance of Old Hollywood; the fantasies we have about film stars and the fantasies the Burtons had about each other.

'Brilliantly funny . . . the book of the year' - Sunday Times

'By turns, funny, tragic, tender and vicious . . . a word-of-mouth sensation' - Guardian

(P) 2023 Quercus Editions Ltd

About Roger Lewis

Roger Lewis has achieved considerable word-of-mouth success with Seasonal Suicide Notes. He has also written a biography of Anthony Burgess, and Sunday Times best-selling books on Laurence Olivier, Peter Sellers and the Carry On actor Charles Hawtrey.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Anna

I cannot tell yet whether I loved or hated this book, but I can tell that no editor was employed.......more

4.5 Stars At just over 600 pages this is a mammoth biography of the controversial Hollywood couple Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. I have read a few other high quality biographies on the subject in the past, but this one was very unique and engaging. I'm hard pressed to try and verbalize just ho......more

Goodreads review by Dominic

This is such a provocative, self-indulgent work of egotism masking as a story of (amongst other things) egotism, that shouldn't work and yet - maddeningly - does. Every time you are ready to hurl the book away because of some crass comment it's followed so quickly with acute insight that you don't.......more

Goodreads review by Owen

Was completely floored by this epic, overwhelming, at times disgusting low modernist account of the life and times of these two charismatic monsters, written like Ian Penman if viagra rather than heroin was his tipple of choice. I'd never read anything by Lewis before, and though this high-wire styl......more

Goodreads review by Neil

Assiduous, acerbic, bitchy, highbrow, lowbrow and all the brows inbetween; exhaustive, digressive, playful, vituperative; a work that swings from passages of blazing passionate declamation to grumpy-old-man irascibility; that simultaneously wants to hymn a certain period in pop culture and start a f......more


Quotes

Thirteen years in the writing, Erotic Vagrancy doesn't only surpass every other biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton yet to appear, this rich and articulate book is also about celebrity, creativity, being flawed and being brilliant. Belfast Telegraph

It is one of the very best biographies I have ever read. One of the best books about fame, desire, Hollywood and mid-to-late twentieth-century culture ever written. Inside which, brilliant, hilarious and sensitive insights on all
manner of subject fizz and froth. Magnificent, terrible, tragic, triumphant.

Lewis' prose, so electrifying, so funny, so sharp, so unsolemn, always going in unexpected directions, and with all those hilarious asides. Erotic Vagrancy gave me a week of pure joy Craig Brown

A hot thunderstorm of a book David Hare

Unputdownable

Fascinating and hilarious . . . The joy is in the writing and the writing is joyful . . . The boldness of Lewis's writing is perfectly suited to the charisma of his subjects. Sunday Times

As extravagant and uncompromising as its badly behaved stars. Observer

Lewis's magnum opus is a masterpiece in a genre of his own invention. The Times

He is a genius writer . . . - brilliant, witty, exhilarating, and a fund of good stories. The Telegraph

A wonderful book . . . so deliciously written . . . Erotic Vagrancy is the biography of the year. Correction. It's the book of the year and then some Mail on Sunday